Hudson Rowan was trolling. When the ninth grader’s mother insisted last spring that he enter a contest in upstate New York to redesign the “I Voted” sticker, he scribbled a bleeding-eye “spider robot creature,” as he calls it, in the app Procreate, as an act of teenage protest. Months later, that creature not only won the Ulster County competition but spurred global headlines and even a tattoo. Rowan has come to understand why. “The world is a crazy place, with everything going on, and the sticker has that same feel,” he says.
After Rowan struck a nerve by challenging the red, white, and blue conventions of voting stickers, we tasked half a dozen major design and branding firms—with specialities ranging from political campaigns to sci-fi movies—to reimagine the “I Voted” motif with a single goal: to get people to vote.
Tandem
A healthy democracy requires a strong voter turnout. It’s something we use or we lose. That is why Maria Arenas—a designer at the branding firm behind Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 campaign—imagined exercising the right to vote as literal exercise.
Arenas’s cartoon bubble letters sweat alongside their human counterparts who’ve managed to rush the polls on their lunch breaks, or before or after work or school drop-off.
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